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James Kanter/IHTA sign of the times in New Delhi, where the city authorities instituted a ban on plastic bags this year.

Nikhil Kumar, 25, who works at a stationery shop in Khan Market, a high-end shopping center in New Delhi, said the store had been providing customers with paper bags recycled from newspapers for at least the last seven years – long before the city government imposed a ban on plastic shopping bags in January.

Mr. Kumar said he’d seen a television program showing the innards of a dead cow that had consumed more than 40 plastic bags. He said it left a deep impression on him.

“Now that we have the ban, the city is even cleaner and animals are safer,” said Mr. Kumar, adding that the shop sourced its recycled bags from a charitable group supporting street children.

Not everyone, of course, has celebrated the move. As my colleague Heather Timmons noted earlier this year, plastics industry representatives in India complained that the plastic bag ban was shortsighted, given that roughly a million people in India earn a living manufacturing them.

ReutersA town in Belgium has established a weekly meat-free day, while an Australian suburb banned bottled water — both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Australian town of Bundanoon, roughly 90 miles southwest of Sydney, voted to ban bottled water this week to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with bottling and transporting the water, according to Australian media.

Huw Kingston, a local businessman and the organizer of a campaign group, Bundy on Tap, said that 400 people turned up to the Bundanoon Memorial Hall to vote in favor of the ban, with only two casting dissenting votes, according to a report.

Free water fountains would be installed in the town to replace the bottled water, the report said.

Meanwhile, city workers in Ghent, a Flemish town northwest of Brussels, have opted to make Thursdays a “meatless day” and to eat vegetarian meals to improve health and reduce the impact of raising livestock on the environment, according to Ethical Vegetarian Alternative, a Belgian campaign group.

From top: Germany is depicted as a paved-over car culture; Austria as an energy powerhouse; Spain as a construction site; and Hungary as a nuclear think tank. (Photos: James Kanter/The International Herald Tribune)

Installing a grand artistic exhibit at European Union headquarters in Brussels has become part of a tradition for each new country taking over the E.U.’s rotating presidency.

For the next six months, it is the turn of the Czech Republic, and the display, entitled Entropa, highlights among other things the role of the energy industry and the problem of environmental degradation in a number of member states.

The huge displays suggest that Germany is dominated by its cars and autobahns, Austria by cooling towers for power plants and Hungary by nuclear know-how. Spain is a giant concrete construction site.

(Non-environmental themes are also on display. From my colleague Stephen Castle in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune: “In the 16-square-meter, or 172-square-foot, work, Bulgaria is portrayed as a lavatory and France as a country on strike, while Britain is absent from Europe altogether.”)

The Czechs say they commissioned Entropa to the Czech artist David Cerny, who was to solicit contributions from artists in all 27 member states. The idea, the Czechs said, was to court controversy by depicting common stereotypes or prejudices — and to prove that there is no place for censorship in contemporary Europe.

The previous incumbent, France, installed a giant balloon, which encountered little controversy, but did run the risk of becoming a metaphor for hot air.

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